Okay,
Welcome back to the Spiritual Recalibration Series.
Thank you for embarking on this series and opening yourself to a new way of being.
My name is David,
And this is Session 6,
Freedom.
Find a comfortable seat in a space where you can allow yourself 20 minutes or so,
Undistracted,
To focus just on you.
A quick reminder,
To get the most out of this series,
Please be sure you've listened to the Welcome Session,
Session 0.
Here we go.
Just on this,
And so we might end up doing a Part 1 and a Part 2 on this,
We'll see.
But on freedom,
It really is anything that we feel has power over us,
Clamps down our freedom.
Anything that we give away control to,
Control of our peace of mind.
Things that we do compulsively,
One of the things I remember in my yoga teacher training,
One of the first things that just really relaxed me,
Excuse me,
At the beginning of it,
When she was just saying,
You're supposed to enjoy this.
Yoga is not compulsory,
Meaning you feel like you have to do it,
Or you feel like you should do it.
So looking at our lives as far as what are we doing because we feel like we're supposed to.
But the thing I want to speak about more this morning is fear.
There's certainly a lot of that going around now here in early 2021,
It's been going on for a while,
A long while,
Even longer than COVID and such,
Right,
Fear.
It's always been here.
So what I just want to mention to you,
I don't know if this is a tool or a technique or a concept,
But it's leaning in.
Because what happens with fear is we want to avoid it and push it away.
So the example I want to give you that came up has to do with a paddleboard.
Interesting we speak about a paddleboard at this time of year here in the Northeast with snow on the ground.
But I was introduced to paddleboarding years ago,
And I got up and I tried it and I really enjoyed it just standing up there and the weather is warm and I was on a lake or like a large pond and just moving through,
It was so relaxing,
Standing on the board and paddling one side and then the other side and being outside in nature with the sky and the trees and the warmth and the sun,
It was wonderful.
And then the next time I tried it,
I was on a family vacation out in Cape Cod and it was a much bigger body of water.
So I took the paddleboard out and I was really excited to do it.
And I got out there and once I got pretty far from shore,
I turned and I looked at shore and I noticed how far from shore I was.
And I had kind of this open water fear come over me where I kind of started looking down at the board,
Just seeing the water there was started,
My mind started going how deep the water is,
How far away and so I just got into this really thought-based fear being out there.
So I had some anxiety rising and so that happened.
And I ended up paddling close to shore.
I paddled and I stayed close to shore and it was okay once I got myself a little,
Once I felt like there was the safety of the shore nearby.
So I paddled,
So I only did it like once or twice that summer,
Did it again when I went on a short trip to Maine,
Again,
Same thing,
Stayed really close to shore.
This now was a body of wood,
This was like an inlet near the Atlantic ocean.
So I had a lot more potential fear to thinking about this sort of thing,
But I really enjoy paddle boarding.
So just don't know if it was last summer,
I think maybe it was just last summer.
I went out again and I was on a smaller body of water,
But I wasn't that far from shore,
But I still felt the same feeling.
And this time what I said to myself and my mind was lean in,
Lean in.
By leaning in,
I let the fear be there,
Not saw all the mind thoughts about all that stuff,
But the feeling of being afraid as opposed to pushing it away and just managing it by dawdling near shore and waiting for that feeling to go away.
I let it in,
I leaned into it and when I say lean in,
I actually made it bigger.
How much of this can I feel?
How many places in my body can I feel it?
How deep can I let it go?
Because the reality is that there is nothing that the light in your heart cannot dissipate.
I remember hearing Eckhart Tolle talk about with anxiety,
Talking about transmuting.
That was the word I believe he used,
Transmuting,
Where if you allow that,
That anxiety,
That fear-based thing,
If you allow that to be and really get present with it,
It can transmute into intense presence in the moment.
So leaning in.
What ended up happening is I stood there on the board leaning into this feeling and it was probably less than a minute that it lasted.
And then I opened my eyes and I was free.
I had a great day on the board.
And so when I experienced that,
I guess it makes you curious in how many places in life can we lean in?
Can we let it be just as it is and allow the light in our hearts to do what it knows how to do?
I guess that's the only way I can say it.
So these things,
So circling back to the very beginning,
Whatever that open water fear was on the paddle board.
Now I've not yet taken it out into the middle of the ocean,
I'm not saying that,
But whatever it was that was making me not enjoy it myself as much as I could on that board that had power over me.
And so I'm interested in how many things we can disallow having power over us.
And to me,
That's freedom,
Yeah.
Thank you for being with me on that short story about the paddle board.
Let's do a short practice now.
And I want to,
In this practice,
I'm going to introduce you to a lovely,
I'm actually not 100% sure of the original origins.
I think that it was an Irish blessing sung and then sung by an Irish band of some kind,
But it got adopted by a yoga tradition.
It's called Long Time Sun.
It's musical and such,
But we're going to just use the words here this morning.
So let's do a short practice here,
Just a few minutes,
With the eyes closed gently,
Placing your feet firmly on the ground,
Drawing the shoulder blades together gently,
Tucking the chin only slightly,
Placing the hands on the thighs at the junction of thighs and abdomen or a little bit further forward,
If that's more comfortable for you.
Palms up or palms down,
Your choice,
Good.
Breathing into the breath,
The natural flow for just a moment or two,
Seeing if you can find the spot in your nostrils where you can feel the air passing,
Noticing if your mind is wandering off somewhere to your next appointment or the next thing you have to do or something that's going to come up in a few minutes or later today.
When you notice that,
Come back to the breath.
Allow yourself to be here just a few more minutes.
Gently draw your eyes upward,
Gently to the point between the eyebrows and see yourself outside on a warm spring day,
An open meadow,
Seemingly endless grass in front of you,
And you're walking.
Feel the soft air on your face and on your body as you walk,
It's warm.
Hear the sound of your feet on the grass with each step,
There are soft clouds in the sky,
It's morning time,
The sun has risen,
But it's still low,
Low enough that you can see it.
Take in the sunrise,
Hear the grass beneath your feet as you walk.
Allow yourself to hear these words as you walk.
May the long time sun shine upon you,
All love surround you,
And the pure light within you guide your way on.
May the long time sun shine upon you,
May all love surround you,
And the pure light within you guide your way on.
May the long time sun shine upon you,
May all love surround you,
And the pure light within you guide your way on.
Let the visual go now,
Just allow yourself to be here for a few moments,
Feeling this freedom to whatever extent you can feel this freedom from all things to simply be.
Good.
Take a nice inhale through the nose,
And exhale through the nose.
When you're ready,
You can flutter open your eyelids,
Or you're welcome to keep them closed and stay for as long as you like.
